Afanas’ev’s Poetic Views of the Slavs’ on Nature and Its Role in Understanding Paganism and Mythology

Abstract

The article analyzes the mythological concept of Slavic paganism developed by Alexander Afanas’ev in his three-volume study Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature: An Attempt at a Comparative Study of Slavic Traditions and Beliefs in Connection with the Mythical Tales of Other Related Peoples (1865–1869). In this book, Afanas’ev established numerous parallels between the pagan myths of the Slavs and other Indo-European peoples and reconstructed mythological images of the world tree, the tree of life, and the world egg. He also reconstructed myths about the sacred marriage between heaven and earth; the creation of the world from the body of the first man and the creation of man from the natural elements; the dying and resurrected god of vegetation and fertility; and the duel between the god of thunderstorms and his earthly adversary; as well as dualistic myths about the struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness and about the creation of the earth. Afanas’ev also explored enduring metaphorical pairs such as death–dream, battle–wedding feast, thunderstorm–battle, and so on. Depending on the readers’ points of view, they can appreciate the book as a grandiose compendium of folklore and historical-ethnographic materials; as a scholarly work devoted to Slavic mythology; as a symbolarium of folk culture; and as a beautiful fairy tale about the pagan past. Although Afanas’ev’s book has all the attributes of a scholarly publication, it can also be read as a work of fiction in which the author does not so much analyze mythology as he tries to present the point of view of a primitive poet–artist.

Alexander Nikolaevich Afanas’ev (1826–1871) is known primarily as the compiler of the famous collection Russian Fairy Tales, published many times in Russia and translated into other languages. Less well known is that Afanas’ev was also the author of the fundamental three-volume study Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature: An Attempt at a Comparative Study of Slavic Traditions and Beliefs in Connection with Mythical Tales of Other Related Peoples (1865–1869) (hereafter PVSN).

The purpose of this article is, firstly, to introduce the English-speaking reader to the contents of Afanas’ev’s book, which has never been translated into English, and, secondly, to explain why this book unexpectedly became popular in Russia at the beginning of the 21st century.

Afanas’ev graduated from the Faculty of Law at Moscow University and thereafter worked in the Main Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs but lost his job in 1862 after it was discovered that he had been passing documents from the archive for publication abroad. Like many scholars of the time, Afanas’ev was very versatile: he was engaged in folklore, mythology, social history, and the history of Russian literature; he prepared archival publications of Peter the Great’s letters, published the journal Bibliographical Notes, wrote numerous reviews of historical works, and so on. In addition to Russian Fairy Tales, which made him famous, Afanas’ev prepared two other collections of folklore: Russian Folk Legends and Russian Forbidden Tales. The second collection, published in Switzerland in 1867, included erotic and obscene texts. It represented only a part of a larger manuscript collection entitled Russian Fairytales Not for Printing, Obscene Proverbs and Sayings Collected and Prepared by A.N. Afanas’ev in 1857–1862. As with other such works, this manuscript was only published in full in 1997 (note that Russian Fairy Tales is still published with the censor’s cuts).

PVSN occupies a special place not only in Slavic but also in world scholarship and can be compared with Jacob Grimm’s German Mythology, on which Afanas’ev’s work was largely modelled. As Erna Pomerantseva has noted, PVSN, along with German Mythology, represented “the manifesto of the European mythological school” (Pomerantseva 1985, p. 87).

The table of contents of the book, which includes 28 chapters, gives an idea of the wide range of problems PVSN dealt with:

Volume 1

I. The origin of myth, the method and means of studying it; II. Light and darkness; III. Heaven and earth; IV. The element of light in its poetic representations; V. The sun and the goddess of spring thunderstorms; VI. Thunderstorms, wind, and rainbows; VII. Living Water and the Prophetic Word; VIII. Yarilo; IX. Il’ia the Thunderer and Fiery Mary; X. Fabulous tales of birds; XI. The Cloud; XII. Fabulous tales of beasts; XII., Heavenly flocks; XIV. Dog, wolf, and pig.

Volume 2

XV. Fire; XVI. Water; XVII. The tree of life and forest spirits; XVIII. Cloudy cliffs and Perun’s color; XIX. Legends about the creation of the world and man; XX. Serpents; XXI. Giants and dwarfs.

Volume 3

XXII. Unclean forces; XXIII. Cloud-wives and maidens; XXIV. Souls of the departed; XXV. Maidens of fate; XXVI. Sorcerers, witches, vampires, and werewolves; XXVII. Trials of sorcerers and witches; XXVIII. Folk festivals.

On the basis of this table of contents, one can suggest that Afanas’ev’s study had a holistic character and aimed to be a systematic presentation of the main mythological representations of the Slavic peoples. Not limiting himself to mythology proper, Afanas’ev also devoted special chapters to beliefs about sorcerers and witches, witchcraft trials, and folk festivals.

In his book, Afanas’ev establishes numerous parallels between the pagan rites and the beliefs of the Slavs and other Indo-European peoples. In PVSN, the scholar reconstructs mythological images of the world tree, the tree of life, and the world egg; he explores mythological narratives about the sacred marriage of heaven and earth; about the duel between the god of thunderstorms and his earthly adversary; about the creation of the world from the body of the first man and the creation of man from the natural elements; and about the dying and revived god of vegetation and fertility. He also reconstructs dualistic myths about the struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness and about the creation of the earth. Afanas’ev also investigates paired metaphorical topoi such as death–dream, battle–wedding feast, thunderstorm–battle, etc. (Afanas’ev 1865, pp. 258, 368–70, 434–35, 548, 645, 711; 1868, pp. 419–29).

Both in his early articles and in PVSN, Afanas’ev repeatedly expresses the idea that in the folklore texts available to us, mythology is already received in a degenerated form, and the task of the researcher is to reconstruct ancient myths from their later “debris.” For example, he writes, “Ancient beliefs are mostly brought to us in dark and disfigured fragments. Mythology is a science like the science of antediluvian animals: it reconstructs the whole organism from the scattered remnants of antiquity” (Afanas’ev 1996, p. 109). Afanas’ev possessed the gift of a kind of “scholarly clairvoyance,” which he himself attributed to Jacob Grimm (Afanas’ev 1868, p. 5). As Viacheslav Ivanov noted, “Afanas’ev partly turns out to be right, although he did not know many or even most of the proofs of his correctness that modern science possesses. <…> An enumeration of his discoveries which many decades later were rediscovered or redescribed by researchers of our century would take many pages” (Ivanov 1982, p. 159).

To be fair, it should be noted that along with the discoveries in Afanas’ev’s book, there are many statements that have not stood the test of time. To build his mythological concepts, he used materials from a variety of fields, including linguistics, in which he was not a specialist. Modern linguists refine or even deny many etymologies that Afanas’ev borrowed from German and Slavic linguists of his day (Jacob Grimm, Adolf Pictet, Fedor Buslaev, Alexander Potebnia, etc.) (Zhuravlev 2005).

In a certain sense, PVSN may be conceptualized as a grand symbolarium encompassing all nature, living and dead. The “Index of Names and Objects” at the end of the third volume deserves special attention. It was probably compiled by Afanas’ev himself, and from it one can partly judge what in the book seemed important to the author himself. For such symbols as “water,” “winds,” “thunderstorm,” “thunder,” “rain,” “soul,” “stars,” “sunrise,” “moon,” “rays of the sun,” “lightning,” “sky,” “night,” “fire,” “rainbow,” “dew,” “sun,” and “cloud,” the index gives numerous meanings. For example, Afanas’ev identified the following associations of the symbol “cloud”: “flax”; “yarn, cloth”; “yarn, fleece”; “fleece, wool, hide, garment”; “hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, moustache, beard”; “garment, cover, cloak, veil”; “flaming shirt”; “shield”; “invisible hat”; “blindfold”; “blindness”; “shroud,” etc. (Afanas’ev 1869, p. 837).

Depending on one’s point of view, one can appreciate the book as a grandiose compendium of folklore and historical–ethnographic materials; as a scholarly work devoted to Slavic mythology; as a symbolarium of folk culture; or as a beautiful fairy tale about the pagan past. Although Afanas’ev’s book has all the attributes of a scholarly publication, it can also be read as a work of fiction, in which the author does not so much analyze mythology as try to present the point of view of a primitive poet–artist. Afanas’ev presents the worldview of the Slavs, their rituals and beliefs, folklore plots, and pagan religion itself in an aesthetically appealing form. Afanas’ev’s apology for poetic creativity as a driving force of the mythological process betrays the Romantic foundations of this approach, for which language, mythology, and nature itself appear as unique works of art.

Afanas’ev was undoubtedly an excellent stylist. His three-volume work is written in beautiful prose and is aimed not only at specialists but also at inquisitive people who respect folk art and see enduring value in pagan mythology. Notably, Afanas’ev’s early articles, published in the journals Sovremennik and Otechestvennye zapiski, were later included in PVSN in revised form and were addressed to a general public. In addition to scholarly articles and reviews, he was also the author of interesting memoirs, kept a diary, corresponded with numerous people, and published the journal “Bibliographic Notes”.

1. Afanas’ev and the Mythological School

Researchers still refer to PVSN as the most complete summary of everything that was known about folk beliefs and rituals by the mid-1860s. However, the value of PVSN as a compendium of sources and a summary of data on Slavic folklore is limited by the fact that Afanas’ev used a large number of unreliable and even falsified sources (Toporkov 2000). When reading PVSN, one is struck by its extreme heterogeneity; quite reliable information is mixed in picturesque disorder with what is absolutely fantastic. Therefore, every fact that Afanas’ev cites requires verification, and a researcher who trustingly uses the information he cites, relying only on Afanas’ev’s text, runs the risk of being subjected to justified criticism from his colleagues.

Afanas’ev’s scholarly activity is connected with the so-called mythological school in European folklore studies. Having originated in Germany within the framework of the Romantic movement, the mythological school found its continuation in Germany itself and in other European countries. In Russia, a famous representative of the mythological school was Fedor Buslaev (1818–1897), a professor at Moscow University, who was at the same time a linguist, folklorist, literary critic, and art historian and who was consistently guided by the works of Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Humboldt, and Franz Bopp. As already noted, the most important model for Afanas’ev was Grimm’s German Mythology, from which he drew materials on Germanic antiquities. PVSN also actively makes use of the work of other European scholars, including Adalbert Kuhn, Max Müller, Wilhelm Manngardt, Adolf Pictet, and Wilhelm Schwarz. Afanas’ev also draws extensively on the works of the Russian mythologists Buslaev and Alexander Potebnia (1835–1891).

PVSN reflects various concepts that were developed by supporters of the mythological school, including “linguistic,” “Indo-European,” “solar,” “meteorological,” and “demonological” theories. Afanas’ev adhered to the idea of the close connection between language and mythology, partly sharing Max Müller’s ideas about the origin of mythology due to the “disease of language.” Afanas’ev was also clearly aware of the problem of cultural vestiges, which Edward Burnett Tylor wrote about at about the same time.

For a number of reasons, Afanas’ev’s book is still of not only historical but also acutely topical interest. First of all, this is due to the fact that Afanas’ev attempted to give a comprehensive characterization of the pagan mythology of the Slavic peoples. No one either before or after him has been able to do this. The fact is that in the historical sources from which we learn about the Slavs’ pre-Christian beliefs, the names of pagan gods appear and rituals dedicated to them are described, but there is nothing comparable to the mythological narratives of the ancient Greeks or the peoples of Scandinavia. Questions about the level of development of pagan religion and even whether the Slavic tribes had a unified mythology, whether different tribes had their own beliefs in addition to those that came from their non-Slavic neighbors, are still debatable. At the same time, since the Romantic era, the existence of a national mythology has been regarded as an indicator of the high dignity of a people and a guarantee of its historical destiny.

Some features of PVSN and the history of its perception by contemporaries and later readers will become clearer if we proceed from the fact that the scholar was not so much reconstructing ancient Slavic mythology as completing its construction, interrupted by the introduction of Christianity. Fashioning a magnificent picture of pagan Slavic beliefs, Afanas’ev acted not only as a researcher but also as a creator, a continuer of the mythological process. In this way, Schelling’s idea of the emergence of a new mythology that combines features of science and poetry was realized in an unusual way (Schelling 1966, pp. 450–53).

When reading Afanas’ev, it may seem that the author indulges in the flight of irrepressible fantasy, but this fantasy is based on a certain scientific method, which Afanas’ev himself considered quite rigorous. Afanas’ev outlined his ideas about the systematic character of Slavic mythology in a personal letter to Konstantin Kavelin on 4 August 1850:

I do not chase after an artificial and developed system and will never construct a highly developed Slavic way of life when there was none—no, I am far from such an error. I quite recognize the infancy of the people and their religion at this remote time, but I think that even then there could be a system of beliefs, although the people themselves did not suspect it,—a simple system, conditioned by the phenomena of external nature, which has its own strict order and, moreover, an order accessible even to a child. The incompatibility of heat and cold, light and dark, the connection of these phenomena with the annual movement of the sun and with the development or extinction of life—all this is available to early man in the natural order given by nature; and this order had to pass into beliefs involuntarily and give them a systematic character.

(Kavelin 1892, pp. 136–37)

The notion of the systematic character of mythology allowed Afanas’ev to hypothetically reconstruct versions of myths that were not recorded in the sources available to scholars at that time. At the heart of Slavic mythology, according to Afanas’ev, lies the opposition of light and dark. “The opposition of light and dark, heat and cold, spring life and winter deadness—this is what should have struck the observing mind of man especially,” he believed (Afanas’ev 1865, p. 62). “Light and Darkness” is the title of the second chapter of PVSN, which begins the author’s presentation of Slavic mythology.

Afanas’ev traces how a whole system of mythological images is built on the basis of oppositions determined by the emotional and sensual perception and observation of natural phenomena. For example, he notes that “words denoting light, shining and warmth at the same time served to express the notions of good, happiness, beauty, health, wealth and fertility; on the contrary, words denoting darkness and cold encompass the notions of evil, misfortune, ugliness, disease, poverty and crop failure...” (Afanas’ev 1865, p. 94). Here the following are consistently opposed to one another: light–dark, heat–cold, good–evil, happiness–unhappiness, beauty–ugliness, health–disease, wealth–poverty, fertility–crop failure. Describing mythological logic through a system of binary oppositions allows Afanas’ev to be regarded as a predecessor of twentieth-century structuralism (Zhuravlev 2005, pp. 69–70).

On the basis of connections to light or darkness, Afanas’ev builds a kind of “homological series” of phenomena: lightning–sun–day–morning–spring and summer–south and east–red and white–gold–fire–warmth–beauty–health; another series: cold–ice–frost–winter–north and west–cloud–night–sleep–death–black–unclean power–evil–disease. Afanas’ev masterfully unravels long associative chains or, on the contrary, establishes different meanings of any one particular natural phenomenon.

The third chapter of PVSN is entitled “Heaven and Earth.” According to Afanas’ev, the myth of the marital union of Heaven and Earth has just as natural an origin as the myth of the antagonism of light and dark. If light and dark are in a state of mutual antagonism, the representatives of the male and female principles enter into a love affair: Heaven pours out “the fruitful force of the sun’s rays and rain showers” and “excites the productivity of the earth”:

This natural phenomenon, visual to all, was the source of the most ancient myth about the marital union of Heaven and Earth, in which Heaven is given the active, masculine role, and the Earth—the perceiving, feminine one. The summer Sky embraces the Earth in its hot embrace as a bride or spouse, scatters on it the treasures of its rays and waters, and the Earth becomes fertile and bears fruit…

(Afanas’ev 1865, pp. 126–27)

The logical structure of this myth can be presented with the help of oppositions (Heaven–Earth, male–female, top–bottom) and associative chains (thunderstorm–sun–sky–mountain–skull–hair–clouds; lightning–rain–sun rays–male seed; Earth–woman–pregnancy–harvest).

In essence, Afanas’ev reduces all the diversity of the ancient, Germanic, and Slavic gods to two main types—male and female. Afanas’ev describes the mythological pantheon as if on two levels. On the superficial level, there are numerous divine characters and on the deep level, generalized images of masculine and feminine—Father Sky and Mother Earth. In this, Afanas’ev follows Grimm, who wrote in the preface to his German Mythology:

Practically all deities can be regarded as manifestations and parts of something whole, unified: the gods as sky, goddesses as earth; some as fathers, others as mothers; gods create, rule, guide, personify victory and happiness, reign over air, fire, and water; goddesses, on the other hand, were imagined as feeding, spinning, cultivating the soil, beautiful, brightly dressed, loving.

(Grimm 2018, p. 93)

2. Mythology and Poetry

The consistent convergence of language, mythology, and poetry also betrays PVSN’s Romantic character. The scholar attributes an exuberant creative imagination to primitive man, which facilitated a variety of metaphorical inferences “with extraordinary boldness and freedom” (Afanas’ev 1868, p. 406). Afanas’ev believed that “the poetic imagination of primitive peoples treated the phenomena of nature with incomparably greater freedom than what a modern poet can allow himself” (Afanas’ev 1865, p. 156).

The identification of myth with poetry explains the apparent incongruities and alogism of mythology, its freedom of imagination and boldness of association: “Myth is the most ancient poetry, and as free and varied as the poetic views of the people on the world can be, so free and varied are the creations of their poetry, depicting the life of nature in its daily and annual transformations” (Afanas’ev 1865, pp. 11–12). At the same time, Afanas’ev proceeds from the Romantic understanding of poetry as a kind of play, the fruit of disinterested contemplation, an emotional response to the world around us. Afanas’ev seems to urge readers to detach themselves from the burden of scientific knowledge and skeptical reflection and look at the world around us through the eyes of a child or a primitive Slav. Both external nature and the inner world of humanity are endowed with amazing properties. They are permeated with fire and light and are in a state of continuous movement and self-renewal.

To create myths about the conflict of light and dark or about the conjugal union of Father Sky and Mother Earth required no special effort; on the contrary, effort would have been required if people had tried to see the action of impersonal mechanistic forces acting in clouds, lightning, and other phenomena of nature: “To deprive nature of its living, animated character, to see only misty vapors in fast-running clouds and electric sparks in lightning bolts, one needs violence of mind over oneself, one needs a habit of reflection, and, consequently, to a certain extent an artificial education” (Afanas’ev 1865, p. 60). These words almost literally reproduce a fragment from Max Müller’s Essay on Comparative Mythology, published in Russian translation in 1863 (Müller 1863, p. 51).

The myths concerning thunder and the sun that Afanas’ev reconstructes resemble the subjects of picturesque paintings or works of poetry. Initially, mythology does not create a special world, autonomous in relation to reality, but transforms reality itself into a kind of practical mythology. Ancient beliefs, as Afanas’ev depicts them, have a plastic– visual character and are embodied in visible images of natural elements and phenomena. Therefore, to understand them, one does not have to be transported to the past; it is enough just to go into a field at sunset or open a window during a thunderstorm. The state of poetic creation seems to transport a person back to the time of the first creation.

It seems impossible to consider the numerous parallels between Afanas‘ev’s works and the poetry of Fedor Tiutchev (1803–1873) merely accidental. The scientist and the poet share a pantheistic vision of nature, a desire to visualize a kind of poetic mythology, and they both pay special attention to such phenomena as dawn, sunset, and spring thunderstorms (Toporkov 1997, pp. 202–3).

3. In Lieu of a Conclusion

The first, responses to PVSN were rather critical, even though among their authors were Alexander Kotiyarevskii and Fedor Buslaev, who themselves belonged to the mythological school. Recognizing that Afanas’ev had generalized a gigantic amount of material on folk rites and beliefs in his work, his colleagues nevertheless noted the artificial character of Afanas’ev’s overall conception and did not support his attempt to reduce the diverse motifs of fairy tales to myth and, even more, to apply the same method to apocrypha borrowed from Byzantium.

Afanas’ev was too trusting of the ideas of the scholars who seemed to him most authoritative at the time. Following Schwartz, Kuhn, and Max Müller, he searched folklore, rituals and beliefs for myths about thunderstorms, the sun, and other natural phenomena, and, given the pliability and diversity of the available materials, Afanas’ev was able to find what he was looking for, although it might not always convince readers of his correctness.

In the 1860s, the mythological school in Russia was going through the last stage of its development, when, on the one hand, the important works of Buslaev, Potebnia, and Afanas’ev himself were published, and, on the other, these works were subjected to such well-founded criticism that it made the further existence of the school with its concept of “the mythology of nature” and the aestheticization of Slavic antiquities impossible. It is symptomatic that Buslaev and Potebnia, who in the 1860s were still working as mythologists, in their works of the 1870s and 80s, were quite critical of the mythological school, including their own early works, on which Afanas’ev had relied heavily in his PVSN. And Afanas’ev himself clearly changed his point of view as he worked on the book: whereas in the first volume he is almost exclusively occupied with the search for natural myths, in the third volume there are already whole chapters in which natural myths are almost never mentioned.

During the 1860s–1870s, there was a change of scientific paradigms, accompanied by a change in scholarly methods and the goals that researchers set for themselves. In parallel with the mythological school, there appeared other scholarly trends that were no longer associated with Romanticism. Based more on positivism, they sought to obtain verifiable knowledge rather than the construction of beautiful hypotheses and comprehensive systems.

Other scholarly approaches had already completely rejected the mythological school in the 1860s and 1870s; these included the school that focused on borrowing, the anthropological school, and the cultural–historical school. Comparativist researchers pointed to the fact that fairy tales, epic songs, and other folklore texts do not always originate from myths; for example, they could be borrowed ready-made from other peoples. Proponents of the anthropological school found similar beliefs and rituals in different parts of the world that could have originated independently of each other without reference to ancient myths. From the point of view of the cultural–historical trend, phenomena should not be reduced to mythology but be considered primarily in the social context in which they function in a culture.

A well-founded critical analysis of PVSN was offered by Alexander Pypin in his History of Russian Ethnography. For example, he wrote:

Those who are familiar with Afanas’ev’s book can easily recall many examples <…> of the lack of historical criticism, where in the interpretation of myth he bypasses all the intermediate stages of its development, millennia of historical life, and all the distance separating developing tribes. A piece of an ancient Indian, Greek, or Scandinavian tale or a fragmentary detail about the Slavs mentioned by an ancient writer is placed directly next to the latest Russian belief, although the latter was sometimes not even folklore, but simply from a book. The Russian researcher exhibits an exceptional propensity to explain myth by transformations of language, and to find its objective basis in celestial phenomena, and especially to find the origin of gods and the root of their mythological stories in storms and thunderstorms, as in Schwartz and Kuhn; further, [there is] the same tendency to see a ready-made myth in any folk idea about nature, when sometimes there was only one real observation or conjecture.

(Pypin 1891, p. 125)

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the very concept of myth was largely displaced from the realm of science to that of literature and philosophy. At the same time, Afanas’ev’s book, despite the criticism, influenced the teaching of folklore in schools and universities. Many Silver Age writers were familiar with it; Alexei Remizov, Alexander Blok, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Sergei Yesenin all saw in PVSN a valuable source of mythological plots and images.

During the Soviet period, Afanas’ev’s book was not reprinted and was difficult to access even in libraries. I remember that in the 1980s, in the Leningrad Public Library, PVSN was not available for reading in the main reading room, and in order to see it one had to go to the so-called “Special Fund Hall” after obtaining a special referral. It was only in the last decade of the Soviet Union’s existence that the peculiar “conspiracy of silence” around PVSN was broken by Viacheslav Ivanov’s article “On the Scholarly Clairvoyance of A.N. Afanas’ev, Storyteller and Folklorist” (1982) and the publication of a chapter from PVSN in the journal Literaturnaia ucheba. In 1983, an abridged popular reprint of PVSN entitled The Tree of Life was published (Afanas’ev 1983), and, later, another abridged edition appeared under the title Living Water and the Prophetic Word (Afanas’ev 1988).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation in society and in publishing changed dramatically. With the abolition of censorship and the emergence of private publishing houses, it became possible to publish books devoted to topics that had previously been completely or partially banned. At the same time, it became clear that questions about Slavic mythology, paganism, and folk Christianity were of interest not only to scholars but also to the general public. Reader demand for books on native antiquity was largely satisfied by reprints of the classics of Russian scholarship, including representatives of the mythological school. Reprints of Afanas’ev’s works appeared in parallel with those of books by Buslaev and Potebnia.

In 1994, Indrik publishing house published a reprint edition of PVSN and three additional volumes: (1) a collection of Afanas’ev’s articles, entitled The Origin of Myth (1996); (2) a volume of reference and bibliographic materials for PVSN (2000); and (3) a volume of linguistic commentary on PVSN (Zhuravlev 2005). Subsequently, several more editions of PVSN appeared, in which the text was translated into modern orthography. Once the text of the book was posted on the Internet, it became even more widely available.

Until the 1980s, Afanas’ev was known to the public primarily as the compiler of the collection Russian Fairy Tales. Now, readers discovered Afanas’ev anew, as a researcher of Slavic mythology. At the same time, the positive reception of Afanas’ev’s fairy tales undoubtedly transferred to his scholarly work. Thus, true fame came to PVSN some 150 years after the book’s publication in 1865–1869.

To understand the reasons for PVSN’s success with modern readers, one must take the point of view of people for whom everything that Afanas’ev writes is taken as unconditional truth and not subject to doubt. For such a reader, PVSN becomes the main source from which information about Slavic paganism is drawn.

In the 1990–2000s, new works on general and Slavic mythology became available to the Russian public, including books that are noticeably inferior to PVSN in their degree of authenticity. In bookstores, reprints of PVSN stand on neighboring shelves with the phony Veles Book, as well as numerous collections by healers and psychics. Against this background, the works of nineteenth-century scholars (with all their shortcomings!) seem quite trustworthy. The new cultural situation is characterized by a total demythologization of public consciousness, the loss of critical thinking skills, and purposeful mass disinformation of various kinds, including attempts by state propaganda to replace historical knowledge with pseudo-historical “ersatz” aimed at ideological indoctrination. We have to admit, with regret, that not only ordinary readers but also some folklorists do not understand what PVSN is and use material from it uncritically.

Modern historians, linguists, and folklorists cannot offer the public anything even remotely comparable to the aesthetically appealing pictures of pagan antiquity that the reader finds in PVSN. We have already noted that the method of mythological exegesis used by Afanas’ev is in many ways akin to artistic creation. This intermediate position of PVSN between artistic and scientific creation is one of the main sources of the book’s appeal to modern readers.